Homeless

February 27, 2014

So, I’ve written before about how we are moving our Atlanta office to a new location. We’ll no longer be housed in the Village. We found out we were moving a little before the holidays. We started searching. I totally underestimated the lengthy process. There is the viewing of options and whittling down to a […]

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Slow Persistence

February 26, 2014

Building an early startup is a hunt to find ripe fruit for the business. There is not enough time to wait on prospects that are going to take 18 months to buy something or to wait on investors that are going to take forever to make a decision. It’s a scramble to find stuff that […]

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Compensating Salespeople

February 24, 2014

Salesloft put up an awesome post today that shares detailed information about the compensation structure for their salespeople. Go read that; seriously it’s good. Their process consists of biz dev reps prospecting to qualify leads which feed into sales executives who close the deals. Quotas are set at each stage and a clear promotional plan is laid […]

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Secrets of Marketing in Technical Computing

February 23, 2014

“A well planned marketing campaign will make a tremendous impact on interest and demand generation – technology companies generally realize this, but the ones that don’t get it aren’t around for too long — no matter how clever their technology might have been.” -Scot Schultz “The engineers of [technical computing companies] must also be marketing-savvy […]

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Dual Compensation for Startup Founders

February 22, 2014

In building a startup, there is a fundamental economic at play that is helpful to remember from time to time: In return for taking on the risk, liability, opportunity cost, and sheer elbow grease of creating a startup, founders have the opportunity to build two forms of compensation for themselves:  1) the cash that the […]

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The Explosive Growth of Startups

February 21, 2014

I’m convinced there’s a fundamental change happening in the way work gets done.  It’s becoming normal to start a startup.  There will be a lot more startups in 10 years than there are now.” –Paul Graham today in his post announcing changes at Y Combinator The statement above stood out to me today as I […]

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How To Allocate Ownership Fairly

February 20, 2014

It is important to have a solid plan for allocating ownership in a startup. I have read and stored many articles describing best practices for ownership allocation. I have an entire Instapaper folder dedicated to the topic. Of all the things I’ve seen on the topic, nothing is as good as an answer Joel Spolsky […]

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Elements of a Great Pitch

February 19, 2014

Tonight I spent time with the Atlanta chapter of the Founder’s Institute. Part of my role this evening was to judge 3-minute pitches from pre-revenue early startups. I realized in the process that there are several salient elements that differentiated the pitches. Here are my thoughts: Demos or website wire-frames are better than words on […]

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Useful Startup Slidedecks from Georgia Tech’s VentureLab

February 18, 2014

The guys over at the VentureLab are putting on the Georgia Tech Startup Competition this year, which I’ve written about before. I’m excited for the approach they are taking this year. One of the useful things they have done is to host valuable startup slidedecks on the competition’s website. Take a look at those here: […]

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Trust Me, My Numbers Are Conservative

February 17, 2014

I wrote yesterday about the early startup exercise to size a market. Another exercise many entrepreneurs, especially those seeking investment, undertake is to project revenue into the future. We competed in so many business plan competitions and gave so many investor pitches in our early days that I wrote software to help me automatically generate […]

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